


Decks

by ninosbrain



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2014-09-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 19:21:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2359379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninosbrain/pseuds/ninosbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cophine have a lazy day of skating and living.</p><p>Confusing time jumps and fluff</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decks

Cosima sat at her large wooden desk. An old t-shirt cut just above her waist hung from her shoulders, a pair of denim shorts rode low on her hips. The sun was welcoming the world into another glorious Californian morning. Every window in her small apartment was wide open, allowing her to draw energy from the smells and sounds of Spring moving around the space.

With a dreadlock in one hand, and a crochet needle in the other, she expertly threaded loose wisps of hair back into the lock. She wasn’t concerned about her looks too much, her naturally slight frame and cute face being a big help. But she wanted to look nice for her girlfriend no matter how many times Delphine told her she could be as big as a house and bald and she would still love her. Still, she silently hoped Delphine would notice the effort she put in today.

It had been a productive morning. The bed had fresh sheets, her legs were shaved smooth and mugs with a mouthful of tea left at the bottom were tidied away. Her half hour yoga time had taken place on the small patch of decking on the roof of her building.

The deck was directly above and half the size of her bedroom. Three sides of it was enclosed by the neighbours’ red brick walls, the back faced the edge of the beach. There was a small square of garden below that you could see only if you stretched over the banister. Colourful pots and dusty cushions lined the walls. One day Delphine had gotten bored while Cosima was in class and she started to paint the deck wood. Cosima almost had a conniption when she told her, whisper yelling that she didn’t own the building and the landlord didn’t give them permission. Delphine just told her to chill, and that they were the only ones that used the deck anyway.

Cosima loves the blue, purple, green and white planks now. They make her feel like she’s by a surf shack, and it helps her meditate.

A sheet of chicken wire ran along the bottom of the railing. Delphine set that up over a year ago after Cosima kicked her out of the apartment for being mopey when she wouldn’t pay attention to her while she studied. Delphine had told her now they had no excuse not to get the micro pig she had been wanting since she had seen an elderly woman walking one on a leash two months prior. Cosima’s excuse was that she liked the apartment cold and pigs hate cold, but with the chicken wire in place, there was no way a pig could fall off the roof and it could enjoy the sun.

Not being able to find another argument, Cosima had taken Delphine to a micro-pig farm (“A micro-pig  _farm_!? Cosima, let’s become farmers.”) and picked out the smallest, fuzziest pig. Of course Delphine would choose the runt. They packed little Rufus up in her new pink bow that Cosima is sure Delphine stole off a doll belonging to a child that was too busy telling a bigger boy that his bike couldn’t have pretty tassels on the handle bars like hers to notice.

Rufus never developed fully. She had a few health problems on top of her crossed eyes, causing her to bump into stacks books and door frames. But she was so affectionate and such a happy pig.

Cosima heard the clopping of little hooves and felt a head butt against the bottom of her calf. She pushed away from her desk and dropped to the floor, circling her legs around the tiny animal who squealed and grunted, and thrashed her tail in excitement. It took a long time, but Rufus was finally house trained. Cosima was relieved that she didn’t have to think about winding her little piglet up to the point where she peed in absolute elation when she or Delphine even called her name.

Rufus nuzzled into Cosima’s cupped hand then paused. She let out an almighty squeal, suddenly trying to shimmy over Cosima’s thigh. The smile on Cosima’s face grew automatically as the door to the apartment opened seconds later. Cosima was as excited as Rufus to see Delphine, but she let the piglet get to her first.

Delphine kicked off her running shoes and swooped down to pick up the pig before she ran straight through her legs. Cosima appreciatively watched her girlfriend’s thighs and backside flex under her black running shorts. Her black t-shirt stuck to her back and her arms glistened deliciously from where her sleeves were rolled up to the shoulder.

“Allo, my little, smelly, blind porky pig. And hello, Rufus.” the blonde cooed affectionately, holding Rufus above her face, her little feet trying to run in midair. Cosima bit her top lip. It will never be unfunny, no matter how often Delphine greets them like that.

Delphine walked to her practically vibrating girlfriend still sitting on the floor. Her forehead, nose and cheeks were pink and her hairline was a little darker from sweat. She leaned over, kissed her girlfriend’s upside-down lips and deposited Rufus on her lap.

“Have an animal.”

Delphine popped her earphones out and headed for the shower. Cosima stood Rufus on her hind legs and danced with her front hooves.

“Sisi!” Delphine hollered over the running water.

“What!” Cosima yelled back.

“You look hot as fuck today!”

Cosima’s tongue poked out between her teeth and she ducked her head.

\- - - -

Delphine sat on the kitchen counter, one leg tucked under her, the other kicking lightly at the cupboard door, a bowl of cereal in her hands. She was donning a pair of tight boxer shorts and a very loose, white vest that showed off her bare ribs.

“I had a dream about you last night.” Cosima said from the kitchen table, flipping a page of her morning newspaper.  
  
“Ouais, no kidding.” The blonde ran a knuckle over her mouth. “You are a sleep humper.” she continued, sucking in to stop milk dribbling down her face.

“Really? Huh.”

“Only on really hot nights. Hey! Let’s go to Roadkill’s.”

Delphine skipped into the bedroom, shimmying her way back into the kitchen and buttoning her high waisted shorts into place.

Roadkill was a friend of Cosima’s who owned a fast food shack down by the boardwalk. His name is Ned, but when Cosima introduced Delphine to him two years ago, he was extremely hung over. The ever blunt Delphine said he looked like roadkill. The name stuck and customers who had never met either of the girls knew him as Roadkill. Cosima is still in awe that Delphine has that indescribable cool factor. Delphine doesn’t understand what she means.

“Take a jacket.”

“Delphine, I won’t get cold.”

The blonde threw a shirt over one shoulder and opened the front door for her girlfriend.

\- - - -

The two girls skated side by side down the boardwalk. Cosima had been longboarding since she was a pre-teen. Delphine picked it up and matched Cosima’s gracefulness in a matter of weeks in her typical 'I can do literally anything and it’s infuriating for everyone around me' manor.

Delphine sped up and pulled out in front of Cosima. Digging her back foot into the board, she swung it around at a 90 degree angle to a stop, the wheels drifting on the sandy path. Cosima kicked out her own back heel and skidded just short of Delphine who didn’t even flinch when she almost crashed into her front.

“I hate it when you do that!”

Delphine was already pushing tourists out of her way, heading for a clothes shop entrance. Cosima slouched after her, squeezing between over-sunscreened women and fanny-packed men. She rubbed her eyes when she lost Delphine in the sea of people and tried on knockoff sunglasses until her girlfriend got bored and came to find her again.

A familiar body pressed up against her back when she placed dark Wayfarer glasses on her nose. Two thumbs ran down the outline of her stomach muscles and settled themselves in two belt loops below her hip bone, swaying their hips together. Delphine’s front teeth found her ear lobe and nibbled at it.

“Mm, wear them to bed tonight.”

It had taken Cosima quite a while to get used to Delphine’s nonchalant and impulsive attitude. Growing up, she had always thought she was an easy going person, but Delphine’s extroverted and aloof nature was an experience. With past relationships, if someone dared grind against her in public, Cosima would have been mortified, but Delphine was right, she’s never going to see these people again. Let them gossip about the girls who were living a little more than they are.

Delphine sent Cosima down to Roadkill’s while she paid for the glasses, and when she finally skated up to her bar stool, her right forearm was bleeding and her knees were scraped up.

Cosima let out a hardy belly laugh, taking her girlfriend’s arm to inspect the damage. Delphine winked at Roadkill as he slid a hotdog her way, and waited for Cosima’s attention.

“I wiped out.”

“Yeah, no kidding, dude. Is Cordelia ok?”

Delphine rocked her deck under her foot fondly.

“She’s ok. A teenager yelled at me to show him my tits when I skated past him.”  
  
“What did you do?”

“I showed him my tits.” Delphine replied confusedly.

“And did you put on a bra before we left?”

“No?”

“Atta girl.”

“So, I turn back around, slam into a child and fheeew,” she lifted her hand and let it fall onto the bar top, “faceplant.”

“Well thank goodness you didn’t mess your face up. Was the kid ok?”

Delphine’s eyes unfocused and Cosima snorted at her lack of answer.

\- - - -

“What if we took cones and stuff from other animals and implanted them in our own eyes?”

“I think they wouldn’t fit, babe.”

“But if you synthetically made them?” Delphine asked.

Cosima swayed from side to side on her board, Delphine walking leisurely next to her, wheeling her board behind her. Cosima pulled at the thick shirt tied around Delphine’s hips and slid into it, savouring the warmth of the sleeves, and reconnected their hands.

Cosima repositioned herself so both her feet pointed forward and pulled Delphine’s arm around her waist. She wrapped her own around Delphine’s shoulders, the board making her almost as tall as her lover. The blonde continued.

“Like, what if there are other beings on different wave lengths to us. Two dimensional. Like shadows, almost. And we can’t hear them because their vocal range is way past 20kHz. Some animals can hear them and that’s why they stare at nothing sometimes.”

Cosima ran the back of her fingernails over the knuckles pressed securely below her hip.

“And then science happened,” Cosima pushed an amused breath through her nose at that, “and we could see these beings in a spectrum that doesn’t technically exist to us because it’s undocumented and their two dimensional world is living between our walls. And we can’t touch them because they’re 2D.”

Cosima had a sudden urge to feel her girlfriend. She twisted her body. Delphine, keeping up with her pace, laid her longboard down so one wheel lay between her feet. Cosima placed her upper arms on her girlfriend’s strong shoulders and let her forearms overlap on the back of her head, burying her face into her sun lightened hair. Delphine cupped her ribcage and tucked the bridge of her nose against where Cosima’s neck meets her shoulder.

Cosima once asked her why she usually held her by the ribcage instead of wrapping her arms all the way around her. Delphine had lifted her chin and pouted her lips in thought. She said it might have been because it felt like the most secure place. The body doesn’t really have flexible joints to move there. The waist does, and the neck, but not the ribs, really. It’s steadfast. And there was something about the way she could feel the movement of live when she breathed, and the slight point as the bones curved around her side fit in her palms perfectly. It’s always warm there, too. You don’t hear someone complain that the top of their torso is too cold very often.

She said she loved to hold her by the hips, too, because she could steer them any way and they automatically balanced the rest of the body. And she likes the feel of them moving side to side seamlessly, and rolling rhythmically; when the skin in her hands never moves, but the muscles and bones can dance underneath. But sometimes, she said, she doesn’t want her like that- Sexually. Sometimes she just wants to hold and quietly experience the physical form of the soul her soul has sewn itself to. Cosima said she thinks she could fall in love again that night.

Cosima breathed in her girlfriend and the surrounding smells of the beach behind her. She hummed happily. Her chest rumbled when Delphine spoke.

“I didn’t tell you, but maman called me a few days ago. She told me you wrote her a letter. As you have been doing every month since you met her? She said when she saw you had replied to her last letter, she knocked over that blue vase in the hall under the big mirror because she was so excited. She locked herself in father’s study and read each page over and over until papa came home, and then she read them aloud to him. He sat and listened to every word and didn’t try to turn on his tv once. He even asked her to repeat a few lines because he didn’t catch them the first time. And he asked for her permission to write a few lines to you in her next letter, if she would help him.”

Cosima’s heart lovingly thumped slow and hard against her chest. Her stomach felt full and warm and she was so comfortable. She could have leaned her whole weight on Delphine, but she wanted to stand with her. As her equal and her teammate.

Neither girl moved because it wasn’t the right moment to. When Delphine continued, her words were paced. She took long gaps in between her sentences, it gave Cosima time and more to process exactly what she was being told.

“You are so incredibly beautiful, and it’s honestly the least interesting thing about you.

“You use my name when you talk and you already have my attention, and it makes something in my tummy hop.

“Everything matters a little less when I can’t link it to you.

“I am the same person I always was, I’m just a happier version now.”

\- - - -

“Dee?”

“Hnuh.”

“I think you should get a job.”

“Gross.”

Cosima tilted her head and stared at her girlfriend from the other side of the room. Delphine was smiling at her own busy hands, Rufus lay passed out in a spot warmed by the setting sun by her side on the kitchen table.

Delphine needed to be kept busy or she gets extremely agitated. While Cosima is happy to sit in one spot for hours and read a book or surf the internet, Delphine needs an end product to justify her time.

In the first few weeks of them officially living together, Cosima began noticing little origami penguins made from scrap notes showing up around the apartment. She thought they were cute. Then she noticed a broken cupboard door was fixed and her desk drawer didn’t stick anymore. Page corners of her text books started to become animated flip books of cartoon teapots wishing her a lovely day. Monsters made from seashells and feathers protected Cosima’s books. And when Cosima had to pour her morning cereal from the bag because Delphine had taken the box and made a cardboard house with furniture for a snail she found on her morning run, she knew she had to find another way for Delphine to occupy herself.

So, one day, when Delphine came home from doing whatever Delphine does during the day, Cosima told her she had a present for her. Delphine reverted from content to her only other mood- over-excited. She spotted the large cardboard box in the corner of the room and slid to it in her socks.

“Wood!”

“Lots of wood. That you have to cut and sand down yourself.”

“Waah! I’m going to make so many stuff!”

“Things.” Cosima corrected. Her girlfriend was buzzing from side to side unsure if she was allowed to touch the wood. “And no, you’re going to make a chest of drawers.”

“Okay!” Delphine was almost hyperventilating, eyes were massive in wonder. Her eyebrows drew to a point not understanding, but going with it anyway.

“And you’re going to neatly store these in it.” Cosima struggled to lift the microwaved sized box by her feet. Delphine rushed over to grab it for her and set it on the table, looking back to Cosima for permission and tearing into the box when she got it.

“Bwagh! Colours!”

Delphine snatched bag after bag of colourful beads, feathers, felts, threads and shiny rocks, and paper, and sketch books, paint, pencils, and she was about to burst.

“What is this!” Delphine asked, gasping for her breath.

“It’s a label maker.”

“I’m going to make so many labels! What’s a label!”

Cosima snorted, filling a glass with water and Delphine downed it in three gulps trying to calm herself back down.

“A tag? Like a name tag?”

“I’m going to tag everything!”

Cosima threatened to confiscate the label maker when she found Rufus with a ‘bacon’ tag on her tail. Delphine said she was a grown woman and she can’t confiscate her property. Cosima blinked very slowly at her. Delphine apologised, her shoulders up around her ears.

“Gross?” Cosima repeated.

Delphine looked up and her smile dropped when Cosima slowly blinked at her.

“Why do you want me to get a job?” she asked in annoyance, frowning back down at her craft.

“I think it’d be good for you. Put that Ph. D to use. And it would be nice to have a little extra money coming in.”

Delphine hummed. Cosima was quite put out by her unwillingness to discuss the matter. A few choice words about Delphine needing to have some responsibility were bubbling up inside her.

“You won’t even consider it?” Cosima strained.

“I’ll get a job when pigs fly.” Delphine responded, muttering immaturely.

Cosima was shocked. It was so unlike Delphine to shut her down like that. They had never brought up the fact that Delphine wasn’t working, and maybe this is why, Cosima thought. Pressure built inside her chest, anger gripping at her stomach.

“Hey, Crossima.”

Cosima snapped her eyes to Delphine’s now childish smile, then to her out stretched hand where Rufus lay still sound asleep. A pair of newly sewn pink, net fairy wings were carefully attached to her back by elastic fitted around her tubby stomach.

Cosima felt her bottom lip pull down and wobble, and her eyes blurred with tears before she had a chance to control it.

“Awwwhawhaw.” Delphine chuckled. “My baby, I’m sorry.”

Cosima let Delphine walk over to her and pull her in for a hug.

“That was really mean.” she whimpered, gulping back small pockets of air. Delphine’s smile grew bigger.

“I know, I know.” she shushed. “I’m not funny, I’m sorry. I’ll start looking in the morning. My little angel duck… Cosima, let’s get a duck!”

\- - - -

Cosima’s tongue trailed over Delphine’s softly. Her lips caught her top lip and held it, let it go, found her bottom lip and encased it. Her knees straddled the blonde’s lap and she could feel the hard wood of their deck stinging them. She tilted her head, her glasses bumping the new sunglasses Delphine had stolen from her. She felt Delphine’s tongue stroke the roof of her mouth and glide over the backs of her teeth, paying attention to her sharp canines she adored. They separated with Cosima’s favourite wet seal-breaking noise and her lip was pulled back by perfect teeth to lock them together again. It was familiar and cosy and Cosima let out a satisfied breath through her nose.

“You’re a really good kisser.” Cosima sighed. Delphine smiled at her and pecked her lips, keeping her eyes on her face. “And you’re my favourite.”

Cosima put a finger in her girlfriend’s dimple.

“I’m your favourite what?”  
  
“I don’t know. My favourite… association.” Delphine’s face was already lighting up in anticipation of Cosima’s explanation. “You are the thing I associate with happy and safe. You’re my favourite person, and reason, and time of day, and time waster, and friend and my favourite hug.”

“Being in love with you is awesome.”

“My knees are sore.”

Delphine immediately braced one hand on the wall behind her, the other holding Cosima to her and stood. Cosima yelped and wrapped her limbs around her girlfriend until she was deposited on the garden bench Delphine had built and sewn cushions for. They sat facing each other, legs crossed, knees touching.

Delphine lifted the sunglasses into her hair and tapped Cosima’s hands lightly, starting a game of pat-a-cake.

“Will you sleep up here with me tonight?” Delphine enquired.

“If you give Rufus a bath in the morning.”

“Ok!” Delphine replied, and slapped and clapped their hands together.


End file.
